Smooth and Nonsmooth Lipschitz Controls for a Class of Vector Differential Equations

This paper is devoted to the study of a class of control problems associated to a nonlinear second-order vector differential equation with pointwise state constraints. The control is realized via a function of the state. We extend the results of Akkouchi, Bounabat, and Goebel to vector differential equations and furthermore consider the more general case. Under proper conditions, we prove the existence of optimal controls in the class of Lipschitz functions and obtain an optimality condition which looks somehow like the Pontryagin maximum principle for a smooth optimal control function. For a nonsmooth optimal control function, we derive a suboptimality condition by means of the Ekeland variational principle.Communicated by M. J. BalasThis work was supported by 985 Project of Jilin University. The author thanks Professor Yong Li for valuable suggestions. He also thanks Professor M. J. Balas and the anonymous referees for their comments.